JULY - "Bumblebees will drone round buttercups which crown a sleeping head."

A wild graveyard does not shame the dead.

Not because they are forgotten or gone,

but because they may rest within a bed

where marigolds and stretching cowslips shone.

Or where, on summer days, bumblebees will drone

round buttercups which crown a sleeping head,

While ivy creeps and caresses the stone

and, over their feet, chains of daisies thread.

Beside the knapweed on an unmarked tomb

are poppies which adorn some fresh turned earth,

And primroses - pale in early bloom -

will call each grave to witness this new birth.

These flowers watch from sunrise to sunset

and they remember when others forget.

Wildflower Graveyard by Judith Crow

"Ruby Celebration" rose in the Cottage Garden

Hot July? It is now - but here, in West Caithness, it wasn't very warm for the earlier part of the month. On the third, we had a bedtime temperature of 8°C. Even this morning, in the middle of two glorious days, it was as low as 10°C. As the sun stretched higher in the sky, the day became warmer and my thoughts went back to those wonderful childhood summers when we played outside until bedtime and only went indoors when our tummies grumbled for want of food. We didn't snack back then. We ate what was set before us at lunchtime - we called it dinner - and, unless we foraged for food, that was that - until teatime! We knew the things we could safely eat from the hedgerows and the verges - and we knew the things we should never touch! Poor people have had to pay dearly with their taxes since records began. To chop down a tree was illegal even though it may have been unproductive. A  potentially dangerous and dying tree might have kept a family warm for some time but the person who felled it would have been punished without mercy. If a storm brought down the tree or some of its branches, then it was fine to collect that wood without worrying about the cruel punishment that might have been given for chopping it down. The expression "windfall" comes from just that - the fruit and the twigs and branches that have come down in the wind are free to the forager.

Hedgerow cookery is a niche thing now of course. In 1980, Rosamond Richardson published "Hedgerow Cookery" and thereby encouraged people to stay aware of the marvellous gifts out there in the countryside. It's not stealing! For my part, it saddens me to see waste and I wish I had time to process every little gift I see on the roadsides - apples, bullaces, nettles, fat hen, chickweed... The problem now is that one has to pick one's roadside very carefully due to the poison from vehicle exhausts.  The ground elder, which has me tearing out my grey hair as it creeps everywhere and takes over the garden, (not the hair), was introduced by the Romans as a vegetable!

Clemency has used the flowers of the elder tree again this season to make the best elderflower cordial I have ever tasted. She's furthering my education and gave me a book called "Eat Your Weeds" (published 2022) with a little note as part of the inscription, "check out page 114". I turned to pages 114 - 119 and learned that I might use ground elder as the main ingredient for bhajis. Now I'm listening! Unbelievably simple recipe!

My anti-ground elder trench has worked for a third year running now, keeping it from taking over the wildflower border.

For the previous two years I bought my wildflower seed from "Meadow In My Garden" and was over the moon with it but this year I got a bit too sure of myself and tried my own mix from purchased individual packets. I'm not impressed. Next year I'm ordering from "Meadow In My Garden" again.
The wildflower border is a different kind of pretty this year. It isn't without colour entirely but there isn't that breathtaking mix of summer colours which kept the light on - even through the cloudiest of days.

Wildflower border in the Cottage Garden

I am a big fan of the informal garden but I appreciate other styles too. In the July edition of my regular magazine, there is an article by Kevin Martin, the head gardener at Glyndebourne. Now that's a place I should like to visit! One day maybe!  As a (very amateur) opera lover and a (very amateur) gardener, a summer visit to Glyndebourne might teach me a thing or two! 

"One of the best ways to encourage bees and other pollinating insects into your garden is by providing nectar - and pollen -  rich flowers throughout the year. Lavender, sedum and foxgloves are all great options."

A man after my own heart!!!

They have twelve acres of beautiful gardens including the Mary Christie Rose Garden, the tropical sunken Bourne garden and the elegant Urn Garden. Pity Sussex is such a long way from West Caithness!

My own sedum in the little cottage garden at the side of our house is my end-of-season-barometer. I have always said that, wherever we have been living, as soon as the flowers on the sedum, Ice Plant, turn deep pink, then the end of summer isn't very far away. Fortunately they are nowhere near that stage just yet!

Still green! Proof that summer hasn't finished!

This year we had France here for Bastille Day! July 14th is said to be a day of disorder and the storming of the Bastille in 1789 fell in with that description. This year it was certainly a day of family madness - but it was happy madness! 

In July 1588, the Spanish Armada had a taste of good old British summer weather and, what the British called the "Protestant Wind", scattered them onto the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. More summer madness! Dr. John Dee, philosopher and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth 1, was reputed to have conjured up the bad weather by putting a bad spell on the Spaniards. Funny how a nation changes the object of its hatred! Well, it would be funny, if it weren't so tragic, that it's the people who care so little about power and imperialism, who sometimes lose everything in the related power struggles.

I lost my Tree of Heaven. I was so sad to find it on the ground. Fixing chimneys has taken its toll on the growing things here. The very pleasant men did a good job of the chimneys but the non-manicured garden must have appeared to be a bit of a wilderness. We lost a few plants but we know that, without lines and labels, it would be hard to see where the scaffolding might be erected. The point to this rather sad little story is that, out of the three trees Keith gave me for my birthday, a couple of years ago, there is none left alive. So I set to replacing them. On looking up my Tree of Heaven, I found that it wasn't what I thought it was! The tree I knew as Tree of Heaven is in fact a Stag's Horn Sumach and the tree which was uprooted was an Ailanthus altissima. So the tree I nurtured hopefully was a non-native invasive species known as a Tree of Heaven and is no longer available for sale as far as I can see. The RHS tells me that the Stag's Horn Sumach likes "coastal, cottage and informal garden (and is) low maintenance" so I reckon I'm in with a chance! I shall still refer to it as a Tree of Heaven - sounds so much nicer than Stag's Horn Sumach don't you think?

Views from the Cottage Garden

A postscript to the story of the "Tree of Heaven" - I decided to plant the new one in a different spot so I dug over the soil in which the tree had been with a view to planting out a potted shrub there. Quelle surprise! About three inches underneath the surface I found a root which was supporting a bit of a stem. So this probably means that the scaffolding must have been over the tree and sunk into the soil there, cutting off the growth completely. I took it out of the soil and studied it. The root itself looked quite healthy so I put it into a pot with compost. I'm not really expecting anything as the bit of a stem was looking quite dead but it's worth a try.

Bob Robin is very much a part of my friendship group and he was on hand to give his opinion as each chimney was completed. He approves! He's such a character. At the beginning of the month there must have been a hatching of larger moths because I noticed a few on the walks and a few from the window at the side of the house. As I was observing one of them from the window, a much larger "moth" came in from the north side and did a ballet dance with the first moth - a "pas de deux" if you like. It was Twinkle Toes Bob Robin and he was trying to catch the moth - but the moth outwitted him and disappeared into the herbage!

This set me to thinking about my introduction to ballet. When I was a little girl, I joined Miss Credland's Ballet Class in Saint Andrew's Church Hall on Pashley Walk in Epworth. I wasn't very good at it. I loved ballet music, even when I was small, but learning to dance to it was something else! 

"Tottering By Gently" Rose

Pashley Walk was the first place I had ever knowingly experienced the wind-tunnel-effect. Except for in the summer months, it always felt draughty walking through there. It didn't compare with Orkney of course - but then I found that out much later! Once, when we lived in Orkney, the wind gauge went off the scale - that was the night when the children's three-part metal swing completely buckled and when the caravan, which had recently been vacated after having been the home to neighbours who'd just moved out of it and into their renovated croft cottage, flew across our garden in pieces. Shetland, Orkney and Northern Scotland get a huge share of Britain's high winds. By the end of October, farmers and gardeners make sure everything that might move or be damaged is shut away or battened down.

When I was woken at 2:30 am today, by Orlando, I opened the door to a tree-tossing wind over the garden. It came from nowhere. Earlier, the air had been so still we had been bitten mercilessly by insects and all went to bed rubbing our necks and arms!

Saint Andrew's Church Hall was the location for the Church Sunday school too. I had attended the Baptist Sunday School when we lived at Studcross Cottage but when we moved further into the village, to Aston House, it was closer to attend the church one. My great uncle Wilf (Tonge) made the Baptist school fun but I can't say I really enjoyed attending the other one if I'm honest. We played games and sometimes went out of doors with the Baptist school. I learned about relationships so much more from those games and outdoor play than I did from impassive reading of scripture. One warm day we went into Mr. Brown's field and had to play "dodge the pancake". Such larks!!

I don't normally walk alone, I usually tag along on dog walks, but one day last week I took myself off on my own for a short amble and found that I saw and heard so much more than when the dogs are walking alongside. Did I say walking? It's true - they dictate the pace and the points of interest! I learned a few things on that solo walk and one was the location of the siskin's nest. I had read about how they like to be up high in the pines and guessed they were in ours as they are always here at the feeding station but that day I sensed movement above me as I walked along the edge of the little wood and when I looked up I saw them doing their housekeeping. So now I know exactly where one of the siskin nests is. I feel quite privileged to be in on their secret.

Wildflowers by the roadside

The wild creatures sharing our plot with us can be very secretive - frustratingly so in fact. We know we share with at least one pine marten for example but we have rarely caught it on camera. It is quite indiscreet about where it leaves its little messages though!

"The poo or not the poo? That is the question!"

We have bats too. In the evenings it can be a little difficult to distinguish between the bats and the swallows as they flit and dive for insects in the half-light. Many bats roost in churches -  not so much "bats in the belfry" as they prefer the main body of the church and the porch too. These summer months are a good time to watch for their activity around the local church site - then you can get an idea of how many you have in your settlement - town or countryside.

Ginny and Judith are just back from a graveyard holiday. They punctuated their research with family catch-ups and a visit to Diggerland but the reason for their holiday, as far south as Suffolk, was mainly to find out as much as possible about their ancestors on their father's side and mine too. We know that, here in West Caithness, we are truly fortunate to have so much insect life. This in turn supports other nature. The Flow Country acts as a buffer zone for us in that it is a haven for insects and keeps the environment clean and very much pollution-free. It is such great news that the Flow Country has now been granted World Heritage Status and joins famous sites like the Great Barrier Reef and the Grand Canyon.

But back to the graveyard holiday. Ginny and Judith found that the graveyards which were cleverly managed with wildflower sowings and plantings were the places where they spotted the most insects south of the border. Worth a thought!

Flowers at Flamborough Church

I have a book, "A Shepherd's Life" which was written by W.H.Hudson and first published in 1910. The graveyard holiday brought to mind this lovely passage from that book:

"... I am sitting on the tomb, listening to the various sounds of life about me, attentive to the flowers and bees and butterflies, to man or woman or child taking a short cut through the churchyard... or I am by the water close by, watching a little company of graylings, their delicately shaded, silver gray scales distinctly seen as they lie in the crystal current watching for flies; or I listen to the perpetual musical talk and song combined of a family of greenfinches in the alders or willows..."

Funny how one person's holiday is another's nightmare! We're not those people who enjoy sunning ourselves on hot beaches - looking through the graveyard photos since they arrived home has been a pleasure and I can recommend many a "God's Acre" as a place to enjoy communion with the natural world.

On the way home, close to the end of their long journey, they took the road through the Flow Country. When they messaged to say they had just passed the sign for Trantlemore, I should have realised they weren't coming home by the regular route! It was well worth the diversion because they saw a Golden Eagle. It's sometimes possible to mistake them flying, at a distance, for a buzzard but this wasn't at a distance and it wasn't in flight. Close up, the size immediately gives it away. It has a yellowish tinge to the head and a powerful distinctive bill. They wondered at first if it was a White-tailed Eagle as I had seen one, a few years ago, a little north of its location. It would be unwise to write down exactly where it was because, would you believe it, there are still those who hunt them down. You wouldn't of course but some information just shouldn't get out there.

He clasps the crag with hooked hands:

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

 The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Goldie

From the majesty of the Golden Eagle to the humility of the daisy, we have it all here. We are right next door to a wind farm and yet we are surrounded by insects, birds, mammals, amphibians, wildflowers of all types and sizes, a river full of salmon and otters and trees. The list is endless and a cause for thankful thoughts.

Our garden has all sizes of daisy - variously a symbol of deceit, forth-coming marriage and good luck. It's seen as pure and simple. When I was at Epworth Primary School and then at Frederick Gough Grammar School in Bottesford, I used to make daisy chains at lunch times in summer. The garden at the Epworth school was a delight in the summer months and seemed a million miles away from the dark Victorian classrooms! I taught my own children how to make daisy chains too. Now they teach my grandchildren. Long may the chain continue!

The harvest has started and last week Clemency was jamming and bottling all manner of things - most of which she'd grown in the kitchen garden. There is something wonderful about harvesting produce from the garden and preserving it straight away. If you fancy having a go, don't wait until you have an immaculate kitchen garden. Instead, make a few raised beds and get things growing in there. Eventually your paths will be neatened and you will be able to add further raised beds. Get going straight away, see the results and they will encourage you to do more. There is something for every month of the year. If things go wrong, don't despair - it's part of the learning curve.  

Rose Petals for making cordial

Soon I intend to open up my flower press which I last used some time ago. No idea what is in there - it's such a long time ago that I pressed the flowers. It will be lovely to see the dates and remember picking them. I believe the natural world is now - but it's such a cyclical thing that memory and hope are entwined within the everyday for me.

One flower harvest: sweet peas